Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast

This week on the podcast, meet some of our amazing producers who work to put out Don’t Call Me Resilient. We chat about what motivates us to cover race and put out this podcast — and revisit some of our favourite episodes from the past.

Read on for the list of staff selections. Every two weeks (starting next week), we’ll be sharing some of their picks as full episodes to bring you a summer of Don’t Call Me Resilient flashbacks.

Timeless stories: 65 episodes, 7 seasons

To make this summer “Flashback” series, we listened back on our catalogue. In doing so, we realized each one of these conversations has a shelf life beyond its release date. Many of the stories are timeless and explore complex issues in accessible ways, regardless of the news that may have prompted them.

There’s a lot to revisit: We’ve produced 65 episodes over seven seasons! And each one covers an urgent topic with insightful guests. By looking at issues through an intersectional lens, our guests help to unpack some of the major issues of our time: the uneven impacts of the climate crisis, the search for missing Indigenous children at residential school sites, immigration, Black health matters, Why the Gaza-Israel conflict is so hard to talk about, surveillance, policing and more.

Our listeners are active and engaged

Our recent listener survey confirmed that our listeners are engaged. You listen and take action, whether it’s sharing an episode or reaching out to a local politician — or, in the case of university and public school educators, adding our episodes to your curriculum.

Whether you’re a dedicated listener, a dabbler or a newbie, we’re glad to have you as a part of the Don’t Call Me Resilient community.

Stay in touch and pitch us your podcast ideas

Please stay in touch: send us questions, comments or suggestions for future episodes at DCMR@theconversation.com — or on Instagram @DontCallMeResilientPodcast.

We are thinking ahead to Season 8! If you are a scholar, and are considering sharing your research through podcasting, we’d love to hear from you. To find out more, read the criteria and fill out the pitch form (select Podcast from the drop down menu).

Staff recommendations:

In this episode, two Indigenous land defenders, Ellen Gabriel and Ann Spice, join us to explain why they work to protect land against invasive development and why it’s necessary for everyone’s survival. Ellen Gabriel is a hero and a legend to me and Ann Spice captured my attention on social media. It was an honour to speak to both of these two Indigenous land defenders of two different generations. It’s a lovely and inspiring conversation. -Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer

In this episode, Min Sook Lee, documentary filmmaker and OCADU associate professor, shares her knowledge on migrant farm workers in Canada. For me, this episode about how we treat the migrant workers who put the food on our tables was a personal one. I grew up in a town called Chatham, which is in southern Ontario. And as a teenager, I lived on a farm for a year and had some personal experiences with people who would come to Canada as migrant workers. I would talk to them …but I didn’t really know them — and the hardships they faced. All these years later, it sounds like things are worse for them. This episode uncovers one of those hidden stories about Canada. Canada sometimes likes to paint itself as better than other countries. And I came away educated, thinking about all the stuff I didn’t know that I should have known and happy that I learned about it. Scott White, CEO and Editor in Chief of The Conversation Canada

As producers, we struggled with how to talk about what was going on in Gaza. We wondered if it made sense to talk about food culture even as we were witnessing all these horrors on our phones. This episode — which originally streamed on Nov. 16th, 2023 — features Elizabeth Vibert, professor of colonial history at the University of Victoria with Salam Guenette, a researcher and film producer of Palestinian descent. Vibert and Guennette worked on a food research project on Palestinians living in a refugee camp in Jordan. In the episode, they reflect on food as a form of preserving identity and memory in exile. As a historian who studies colonial past, Elizabeth makes the case that the rhetoric around Palestinians as barbaric or backwards both historically but also in that contemporary moment is rooted in a long history of colonizing narratives including the view of Indigenous lands and Indigenous people as uncivilized. Ateqah Khaki, Associate producer

In this conversation, I speak to two famine scholars about the use of starvation as a weapon through two historic examples — the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America and the 1943 famine in Bengal, India. This conversation is one I’d wanted to have for a long time. The idea of comparing these very large histories to talk about famine and starvation as a tool used by colonial occupiers was scary. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but the episode is terrific. (First published on March 28, 2024) Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer

In this “bonus” episode from February 2022, Cheryl Thompson, professor of performance, breaks down “the slap heard around the world” after Will Smith attacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. This was one of those cultural moments that everybody was talking about and Cheryl provided this incredibly intersectional approach looking at gender and race and power and how all of those things intermingled. Because of the depth of her knowledge, this episode broke down that slap in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Jennifer Moroz, Consulting producer

This episode is about long COVID, and how it disproportionately affects women of colour. It first aired November 2022 when our collective mindset was coming out of the pandemic, whereas there was this whole population of people who were living with the consequences of the pandemic. And this population is still feeling these effects. Our guest, Margot Gage Witvliet, a social epidemiologist at Lamar University in Texas, studies health disparities, especially as they relate to long COVID. And she is living with long COVID herself. Our then-producer, Lygia Navarro, who pushed for this episode, is also living with long COVID, so she understood the implications of it, what the stakes were and how under-covered it was and probably continues to be. It was this wonderful conversation that mixed both personal with research. Jennifer Moroz, Consulting producer

This episode, again featuring Prof. Cheryl Thompson of Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Beauty in a Box, was particularly interesting to me. North American Black women have been using hair relaxers for decades to help them fit into mainstream workplaces and the European standards of beauty that continue to dominate them. Recently, research has linked these relaxers to cancer and reproductive health issues and there have been a string of lawsuits attached to this. When I heard about these hair relaxers not just damaging your hair, but damaging your body, and that thousands of women now had to live with the reality of fighting for their life with cancer, I knew that was a story we had to cover. (Originally streamed October 12, 2023.) Dannielle Piper, Associate freelance producer

Carl James is a rock-star academic to me. He’s been sounding the alarm about the future of racialized children in our schools for years. In this episode, he talked about how important public school education is to the future of Canadians, how the divides in our system are deepening and what we need to urgently do to make things better. Carl, a professor of education at York University, was joined by Kulsoom Anwer, a high school teacher who works out of one of Toronto’s most marginalized neighbourhoods, Jane and Finch. They discussed the injustices and inequalities in the education system — and the way forward. This episode was originally published on Feb. 17, 2021. Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer

In this episode, Vinita talks to Christina Clark-Kazak, professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, about Canada’s refugee system. While there is a lot of discussion — and often polarized opinions about immigration — people don’t always have an understanding of the system and this episode explains it well and for different programs (Syrians, Ukrainians, Gazans). Clark-Kazak also shares how everyday Canadians can influence policy through political pressure and by sponsoring a refugee family. Lisa Varano, Managing editor, The Conversation Canada